The problem with fear
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Sean of the South
I woke up thinking about you. There I was, at 4:41 a.m., sitting in my living room, wondering about you.
I heard the doctor gave you bad news. And I couldn’t help but imagine how afraid you must be.
Fear is a curse. A primal heirloom, passed down through our DNA. A gift from our ancestors. Fear kept our forebears alive.
Our ancestors HAD to be afraid to survive. If our ancestors hadn’t been frightened, they would have been alligator food. Human culture would have never advanced. We would all still be sitting on rocks, wearing loincloths, poking beehives with sticks.
Your body needs adrenaline to keep it from danger. Otherwise, you’d do stupid things such as stepping into traffic, walking out a ten-story window, or listening to pop country.
But now your internal alarm system has turned against itself. Now you’re swallowed by the very emotion that was supposed to defend you. And while I don’t know what you’re going through, I do know fear.
I’ve wrestled with fear my whole life.
As a boy, I went through a lot of trauma. My childhood household featured abuse, gun violence, and suicide. My father held my family hostage one night, threatening to kill us. County deputies showed up with riot guns. Then my father took his own life.
So, my little body got stuck in Fear Mode. I was always afraid, without even KNOWING I was afraid. Sometimes my biology was afraid even when I thought I was fine.
I could be watching the ABC Sunday Night movie, for instance, and just as Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal were getting busy on the beach, for some reason I was anxious.
Little did I know that my glands were flooding my body with those addictive little warming squirts of adrenaline. I was hooked on the drug. I couldn’t kick the fear habit. Fear became my go-to emotion. Fear became both the object of my abuse and my abuser.
And I can honestly say that after all these years of experiencing fear, I have learned something: Fear is not in your head. There are no thoughts you can think to get rid of it. Because fear is not a head problem.
Fear starts in your soul.
What is your soul? you ask. How do you reach this soul you have?
Well, for starters, you do not HAVE a soul; you ARE a soul. Your soul is who you are.
If you were to remove your soul from your body, you’d still be you. You’d still have your same quirks, same sense of humor, same affection for Little Debbie products. What would die, however, is your shell, and all that goes with it. Things like your culture, your religion, your expensive dental work, etc.
But that inner part of you… That’s the real you. And that’s where the fear lives. So how do you purge it?
Recently, I walked the Camino de Santiago. It was a hot day in Spain. We were crossing Galician mountains, and I was lagging behind the group.
I hiked alongside a man who wore a gray cotton robe. His head was shaved. He was a Franciscan friar, from Italy. He told a story.
“Doctors told me I had colorectal cancer. They said I was going to die soon.
“The first thing I felt was fear. I learned that my fear was much worse than my cancer. I learned that fear was a worse fate than death. I had to treat my fear before I could even think about treating my cancer.”
As we walked, he explained.
“You see, the opposite of fear is freedom. When you are afraid, your soul is not free. You are contained in a prison.
“But freedom. Freedom is just another word for ‘love.’ And when you immerse yourself in Perfect Love, you are free. There is nothing that can harm you anymore. Not even death. You are freed from prison.”
I asked how one might find this freedom he spoke of. This Perfect Love. He stopped walking. He rested a hand on my shoulder.
He looked into the big blue sky.
“Funny thing about this prison,” he said. “There are no locks on the doors.”
